Playbook

Secure SDLC for lean teams

A Secure SDLC that fits real delivery: small, measurable controls embedded in CI/CD—without slowing teams down or creating “checkbox security.”

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At a glance

  • Who: Product + engineering teams.
  • Outcome: Repeatable gates + metrics.
  • Time: 1 week baseline, then iterate.

Version 1.0 — baseline-first.

What you’ll have at the end

A minimum viable Secure SDLC: clear gates, lightweight threat modeling, and security signals you can measure.

Deliverables

  • Secure SDLC stages and “done” definitions.
  • CI/CD security gates (SAST/deps/secrets/IaC) aligned to risk.
  • Threat modeling mini-template that teams actually use.
  • Metrics: coverage, findings, remediation time, release hygiene.

Core principle

Don’t try to do everything. Do a small number of controls extremely well, make them repeatable, then expand. Most teams fail by starting too big.

Step-by-step playbook

Implement in order. Each step provides value on its own.

Step 1 — Define your “crown jewels”

  • List critical data + systems (identity, payments, admin, production pipelines).
  • Decide what must never ship broken (auth, secrets, critical vulns).

Step 2 — Add minimum CI/CD gates

  • Secrets scanning (block on secrets).
  • Dependency scanning (block on critical known exploited / critical CVEs).
  • SAST (warn first, then block on a short ruleset).
  • IaC scanning (block on highest-risk misconfigs).

Step 3 — Make threat modeling tiny and repeatable

  • Every new “major feature” gets a 30-minute threat model.
  • Capture: assets, entry points, trust boundaries, abuse cases, mitigations.

Step 4 — Define secure defaults

  • Logging: security events are captured (auth, admin, key actions).
  • Auth: MFA for admin, least privilege, no shared accounts.
  • Secrets: never in code; rotated; scoped.
  • Deployment: immutable builds, versioned artifacts.

Step 5 — Add “evidence-ready” logging to SDLC

  • Ship an audit trail for major actions.
  • Document log fields and retention before production.

Step 6 — Track metrics that matter

  • Time-to-fix for high severity findings.
  • Release hygiene: percentage of releases passing all gates.
  • Coverage: repositories with baseline controls enabled.

Quick checklist

Use this to validate the baseline across teams.

  • Secrets scanning blocks merges.
  • Dependency scanning blocks critical known exploited issues.
  • IaC scanning blocks high-risk misconfigs.
  • Threat modeling template exists and is used.
  • Security event logging is defined before production.
  • Metrics are tracked monthly and reviewed.

Want this mapped to your exact pipelines? Request a consultation.

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